The Tangential

“Personal Shopper”: Kristen Stewart Stars in a Very French Ghost Story

“There were about nine movies in there,” said my friend Stephen as the credits rolled on Personal Shopper. I knew what he meant, though personally I only counted three — so deftly interwoven by writer/director Olivier Assayas that they feel like slyly shifting levels of the same seductive reality. On one level, it’s a straight-up ghost…

Emagine Plays Moneyball with Twin Cities Movie Theater Scene

At Thursday night’s grand opening of the remodeled Emagine Willow Creek movie theater, I ordered a martini from the lobby bar. They didn’t have any vermouth, so it was just a glass of gin with a couple of olives, but that was more gin and more olives than I was ever able to get at…

“Kong: Skull Island” is a Mediocre Monster Movie with Pretentious Cinematography

If you squint hard and peer back past the various boots and reboots of King Kong, you might catch a glimpse of the climactic scene of the 1933 original, with its iconic image of the eponymous ape climbing the Empire State Building. The King gets no such urban experience in Kong: Skull Island — he doesn’t even get to…

“The Lego Batman Movie” Lets the Caped Crusader Live a Little

Sometime between my ’80s childhood and the 2014 Lego Movie, the little Danish bricks got an attitude. It may have been a matter of self-defense after the once-pure yellowheads signed licensing deals with every franchise from the Simpsons to Star Wars, but the movie crystallized an endlessly fruitful comic direction for the toys: poking fun at sacred pop-culture…

“Common Time”: In Making a Case for Merce Cunningham, the Walker Art Center Makes a Case for Itself

Merce Cunningham: Common Time is an enormously ambitious program mounted by the Walker Art Center in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago. It makes the case for the choreographer as a central figure of 20th century art — not just influential, not just respected, but absolutely pivotal. As well it should: in making…

Why Dating Athletes is Great and I Should Do It

Ok, let’s start with the obvious. They’re hot. You can see them from all angles on TV before you go to the trouble of meeting them, so you know what you’re getting into. Even the less hot ones are still ugly-hot. At the very least, they’re in good shape and can protect you from physical…

A short history of The Tangential

The Tangential is a pop culture and creative writing blog launched in 2011 by three writers living in Minneapolis: Becky Lang (now Radecki), Jay Gabler, and Katie Sisneros. That was a golden age of irreverent confessional blogging, and over the first couple years we built a national following. Notably, we gained over 120,000 followers on Tumblr, where we were often associated with the provocative, extremely online writers in the movement known as alt lit. We created spinoff blogs including The Sport Hole, The Party Whip, The Tangential Ruins Minneapolis, and Tan Genitals. We hosted Minneapolis events and published three books.

We were having so much fun, in fact, that we never got around to monetizing. Oops! Well, we did have a little income from the books and events, and we became an Amazon affiliate. (This is your official disclosure that we subsidize our hosting costs via revenue from partner links.) Eventually, though, the editors and contributors who fueled the site’s early years largely moved on to other projects.

Today, The Tangential is run by Jay, who continues to publish criticism and other writing as well as to maintain the site’s catalog of posts — if only for, as we’ve always said, “the good of society.”